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Diversity is the rallying cry in IFORS System Dynamics stream The IFORS conference in Edinburgh this July contains a system dynamics stream which covers a range of people, places and topics. The sessions have been organised by David Lane of the London School of Economics and the aim is to showcase s...

When it comes to choosing between SD and DES it certainly is worth remembering that all modelling approaches are very crude and that the choice is essentially an artificial one. We should constantly remind ourselves that they are idealisations and representation schemes. In this sense "Stocks a...

RE: QUERY does any1 what "second order cybernetics" means (SD3180) Crudely put, Second Order Cybernetics deals with the cybernetics of the observing system and involves an interesting epistemological break from the traditional objective stance towards subjectivity. More details and reading...

> How many system dynamicists does it take to screw in a lightbulb? > May I build on the spirit of Andrew Jones lovely response to this question? What a detail complexity question! You should think in terms of the modes of behaviour of electrical energy usage. Or the modes that describe transitions ...

I think that it important to understand that System Dynamics and DES are rather different approaches, with different styles of formulation, modelling languages and, most importantly, aims for the results of the modelling. Together, these mean that the two approaches are suitable for rather different...

May I take up Geoff Coyles request for "fresh ideas" to "ensure rotation" and suggest that, rather than announcing a founding President and Policy Council and, indeed, the next President, it would be a fine thing to allow full members of the Chapter to exercise their voting right...

You should have a look at System Dynamics Review 10 (2-3) from 1994 which has a range of articles reaching out to OR. I will also happily provide further, more specific references if you wish to pursue further the links with soft OR. Regards, David C. Lane ___________________________________________...

Responding to Mathieu Santerres request for material about system dynamics in French, can I offer the following small crumb of comfort: Lane, D. C. 1997. From Discussion to Dialogue: A case study using an interactive system dynamics modelling approach (De la discussion au dialogue: une etude de cas ...

In one of those coincidences that bewilder historians of science, = the potential links between system dynamics and structuration theory have been touched upon in two different places within the system dynamics community this year.=20 Right now this will probably be of interest to only a minority. H...

Thanks to Roberta for the list of system dynamics books that have been reprinted by Productivity Press. Reviews of many of these books can be found in the Journal of the Operational Research Society, as follows: JORS (1997) 48:1037-1042 Forrester, Jay W. 1961. Industrial Dynamics. Portland, OR: Prod...

I would be very grateful if any one could tell me whether the following ISDC Proceedings Paper has ever appeared in journal form: Mosekilde, E., Rasmussen, S., and Sorensen, T.S. (1983), "Self-organization and stochastic recausualization in system dynamics models", in: J. D. W. Morecroft, ...

I was very interested to read the query by Mohamed Saleh with its Lakatosian view of the field and the subsequent contributions. (Sorry to join this conversation late but I have been away) I have been thinking about this question along with a colleague in the Dept of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific...

Responding to Jaideep Mukherjees query about finding more archetypes, I would say two things: 1) On Accumulation of Archetypes As has been noted by no less than George Richardson (Richardson, 1996), our field has been less than perfect in accumulating knowledge on a number of fronts, archetypes and ...

On a point of information: I know that some members of our community are interested in the links between System Dynamics and the Problem Structuring Methods of Soft OR. In particular, I think that there are some very interesting areas to be worked on relating to Peter Checklands Soft Systems Methodo...

Youd probably have to say it very fast but Ive recently used (well, written): The creation of Jay Forrester of MIT in the late 1950s, system dynamics is a modelling approach which is used both to understand how social systems - in which human actors take decisions which affect events - change over t...

At the London School of Economics we have just completed a piece of work with a major London Teaching hospital which we will go public on in January via the LSE Magazine. Additionally, I hope to present a paper at the 1998 SD conference in Quebec. The details of that paper are shown here: > Looking ...

Ive been amazed at the stern-faced over-seriousness of this discussion. Is the american phrase lighten up, people? Of course any 30 second summary of a field will involve a degree of simplification that makes us uncomfortable. When Feynman received his Nobel he was asked by a journalist to say in tw...

The provenance of the doubling Lotus story extends well beyond HPS and McKinsey. It is probably best known to the world via Lester Browns 1978 book The Twenty Ninth Day: Accommodating human needs and numbers to the earths resources. However, it derives from a French riddle that is used with schoolch...